Cultural, ecological, and educational variables in relation to magical thinking, perceptual flexibility, and logical reasoning seem to be crucial in development of children's judgments and explanations in conservation tasks. (Author)

Analyses revealed consistent support for the hypothesis that number conservation is developmentally prior to liquid quantity conservation. (Authors)

The relation of CA, MA, and IQ to conservation was examined by comparing the performance of bright, normal, and retarded children matched on the critical MA of six years. (Author)

Results indicate that within the limitations of this study there is evidence that children with superior" intelligence showed more mature response patterns on Piaget-type tasks than children of the same age with average" intelligence test scores. (Author)

Discusses the definition of energy found in many high school and college level physics texts, the conflict of that definition with the second law of thermodynamics, and the relation to the concept of the conservation of energy. Suggests not using a definition of energy and provides some alternative strategies. (JM)

Two experiments tested whether children fail to make transitive inferences because they forget the premises. Children did not justify incorrect inferences by incorrect premises. Results between nontransitive and transitive inferers parallelled similar studies with nonconserver- conserver dyads and were viewed as reinforcing the commonality between…

Discusses the deficiencies of presenting the theme of energy in the current West German school textbooks. The article emphasizes the structural importance of entropy for the understanding of energy and suggests how the physics teacher can contribute to the development of an appropriate attitude toward the energy crisis. (HM)

Bogartz questions the Anderson and Cuneo study (p335-78 of this issue) on statistical-methodological grounds and on their positions concerning the concepts of conservation, centration, and compensation. (For Anderson and Cuneo's rejoinder to Bogartz, see p388-92 of this journal issue.) (SJL)

A nonverbal paradigm for assessing conservation based on an operant discrimination learning procedure is described. Initial results suggest that young children who could not conserve within the traditional verbal procedure were more likely to demonstrate conservation within the nonverbal paradigm and that traditional Piagetian tasks are verbally…

A structured interview was used to ascertain the level of understanding of the concept of death in 52 elementary school children. Data analysis showed sex, religious affilation, and the death of a close relative had little or no relationship to the level of understanding of death. (Author/RL)